Teaching Grammar: What Really Works
Amy Benjamin and Joan Berger
Eye on Education, (2010)

Reviewed by Marti Schwartz
Literacy consultant and teacher (DE)
Teacher Leaders Network

Raise your hand if you want your students to be better writers. Good – now raise your hand if you feel, somewhere in your conscience or your gut, that you should be teaching more grammar. Gotcha!


So — how about a book that will allow you to accomplish both goals at once? Teaching Grammar: What Really Works by Amy Benjamin & Joan Berger could be just the solution. Their (combined) experience of 70 years in middle and high school classrooms suggests that these folks truly know what they are talking about.

The authors’ clear explanations of nominal phrases, clauses, coordinating conjunctions and participial phrases helped make many things clear to me. Mind you, I “learned” these lessons back in 7th grade (in Mr. Galuska’s class, where we diagrammed sentences on chalkboards), and then promptly forgot them because they seemed so irrelevant.

Now that I’m teaching high school English to students who hope to become the first in their families to go to college, grammar matters. Raising the quality of their written language is hugely important. What Benjamin and Berger have done is made grammar accessible through some very interesting lessons, detailed explanations, and handy downloads (accessible via a code in the book) which will further help your students and save you the time of creating them.

No longer do I need to puzzle over why Microsoft Word is correcting my ridiculously long sentences; now I know! Using colons and semi-colons has become crystal clear: through examples and activities rather than the dreaded fill-in-the-blank worksheets. How does this translate into better writing? Easily: by naming the function of words, phrases, and clauses, students can identify how to add them in (or remove them) as needed. Here’s an example:
Expanding noun phrases demonstrates to students how to go from: a friend, to a former friend, a former friend who broke my heart, and then a former friend who broke my heart in a million pieces. (54)

Or the idea of embedding a specific number of sentence variations in an assignment (after modeling it in class) and giving students the starting sentence, “The worried mother sat in the waiting room,” which becomes the lead for a paragraph written at home that will include three participial phrases generated from a list of clues describing the woman waiting for news about her sick child. This seems especially effective, as repeatedly urging students to Show, Don’t Tell has, as the authors point out, historically not done the job.

One other aspect I really like in this text is the authors’ inclusion of ways to apply these writing strategies to work outside of the ELA classroom.

Write a paragraph describing a historical problem or period or a science experiment or concept that you discussed during class. In your writing, include and label at least one of the following:

• A compound sentence with a comma and coordinate conjunction
• A compound sentence with a semicolon and hitching word
• A sentence with an adverb clause first
• A sentence with an adverb clause second (119)
And the handout includes both a model paragraph of a historical problem and one of a science experiment, with each of the bulleted items underlined and identified. This is smart teaching!

More good ideas

By mimicking what other writers do well, students can learn to do it, too. Thus students are off collecting examples of sentence types from their reading assignments, and then these sentences are posted as models, alongside student writing.

Techniques such as having students collect all the plurals in an article, or changing all the pronouns to plurals (resulting in massive verb changes), or creating a list of actions such as how to eat pizza, and then rewriting the activity in the past tense — these are all active ways for my students to read real text and yet begin to understand how language functions.

This is huge for the ELL students for whom I am developing oral and written language skills simultaneously. Consistent verb tense is something that troubled many of my sophomores on a recent assignment; Benjamin and Berger take a paragraph of narrative text (from The Watsons Go to Birmingham) and have students rewrite it in the present tense. Bingo! Kids get to see for themselves how it works.

Making charts of verbs and verb tenses isn’t startlingly new practice, but knowing that there are 75 verbs that form the past tense irregularly and then the past participle in a different irregular form is pretty useful stuff! (Think: blow-blew-(has) blown, fly-flew-(has) flown, shake-shook-(has shaken) And by the way, there are only 10 verbs which form their past tense regularly but use an –n ending for the participle (mow/mowed/mown, swell, swelled, (has) swollen). No wonder kids get mixed up! Making this explicit is a sensible strategy so that kids have this skill in their toolkit.

Sure, some of Benjamin and Berger’s ideas are a little offbeat: Villages of Verbs and an Owner’s Manual advising users on how to apply each part of speech seems a little hokey, but if it helps then I’m all for it!

Some other highlights

The first section of the book basically includes all you need to know about the parts of speech with many specific ideas about how to get those concepts across to students.

In the second section, “Guidebook for Embedding Grammar in Writing Instruction,” there is a calendar organizing the authors’ lessons into two full years of teaching. This will make coordinating with my fellow ELA teachers much easier. In addition there are several actual lesson series (with the number of days it will take to accomplish the goal), all designed to embed the grammar WITHIN the writing process, not in isolation. This makes good sense to me and gives me hope that I can and will actually use this little gem!

Honestly, the lessons sound both fun and productive. There are points where the authors point out “the art of teaching” in the lessons, helping novice teachers to explicitly SEE the gradual release of responsibility model which is so artfully crafted into these lessons. Games, movement, group work, and homework assignments are spelled out for six specific concepts: Compound Sentences, Adverb Clauses, Appositives, Adjective Clauses, Participial Phrases, and Absolute Phrases.

The progression of lessons really does ensure that student writing will vastly improve. Explicitly labeling what good writers do, and using the language of grammar, this book and its methods certainly have the potential for students to understand and display good writing craft in a much deeper way.

As a retired elementary teacher called back into high school service,
I’m confident saying the book will be of interest to ELA and literacy
teachers across many grades, from upper elementary through high school. Coupled with two of my other favorites, Everyday Editing by Jeff Anderson and Grammar for High School: A Sentence-Composing Approach, by Don Killgallon and Jenny Killgallon, I feel well-armed and excited about teaching grammar next fall!

Marti Schwartz taught at various levels of elementary school for 30 years, chiefly in Smithfield, RI and now offers professional development workshops in literacy. She is also the creator and co-facilitator of NETWorking (Novice and Experienced Teachers Working Together) at Brown University, and currently serves as  Literacy Consultant to an urban charter high school.